Chapter 785: Chapter 19 Just Want to Play Ball
The 1991 Christmas Day game featured a showdown between the Eastern arch-rivals Chicago Bulls and the Detroit Pistons.
Although fans and the League were very keen on arranging a second Christmas Day game between Gan and Jordan, Portland did not agree.
The 1988 Christmas Day game between the Trail Blazers and Bulls yielded great results, but the players suffered a lot traveling back and forth and missed Christmas Day.
Moreover, the League had promised not to schedule the Trail Blazers for Christmas Day games after 1987 (after doing so for more than ten consecutive years), but they went back on their word in 1988, which caused dissatisfaction within the Portland camp.
After Tang Jianguo became the owner of the Trail Blazers, he declared, "To protect our players’ right to celebrate Christmas, I propose canceling the Christmas Day game!"
Therefore, it became even less likely for the League to schedule the Trail Blazers for the Christmas Day game.
This year, like last year, only one game was scheduled, and the League’s explanation was "to focus the fans’ attention more on one game."
Anyway, the NBA League has quite the knack for rhetoric, previously with few live broadcasts, claiming "less is more," valuing quality over quantity.
In these two years, with revenue and League image improved, they signed a new broadcast contract with NBC, increasing the number of nationwide live broadcasts, and the "less is more" slogan was no longer mentioned.
The more live broadcasts, the better, as broadcasting fees and advertising fees are all money.
In the past, the Christmas Day games would at least feature two matches, sometimes even three or four.
The League explained it as "focus on concentration" due to teams’ non-cooperation and reluctance to play, fully reflecting David Stern’s art of language.
Before the Christmas Day game, the Chicago Bulls had their ups and downs in November but clung to their record relying on defense, returning to the top of the Eastern Conference at the end of the month.
Entering December, unlike the Portland Trail Blazers, the Chicago Bulls welcomed an easy schedule with only 3 away games out of 14, the rest being home games.
The Bulls were fully healthy, while their opponents were plagued by injuries.
In the game against their division rival, Cleveland Cavaliers, Mark Price was injured and out for the season.
The Cavaliers tasted the bitterness of their past decision to trade away Kevin Johnson; without Price, they could only start CBA players like John Morton and Gerald Pado.
The Cavaliers have been at a disadvantage against Jordan year after year, with Jordan scoring many of his high-scoring games against them. Now with their division rival’s star player out, they were even less of a match for the Bulls.
The Chicago Bulls played smoothly, without the stumbles of November, achieving a 9-2 record and climbing to the second spot in the Eastern Conference, just behind the Boston Celtics.
Also, to date, the Bulls have yet to lose a home game.
They defeated the lackluster Los Angeles Clippers at home by a 40-point margin—the Clippers were missing Benjamin and Charles Smith.
They once again overwhelmed the Cleveland Cavaliers with a large score margin, with Price still sitting out, as the Bulls opened the first quarter with a 36:5 against the Cavaliers.
The absence of talent in the League made it very easy for the Bulls to play some games, with scores widening substantially.
While the Bulls’ record gradually warmed up, the internal dispute over the triangle offense continued.
Before Christmas, the Chicago Bulls visited Miami, where they faced the Miami Heat away, and the Heat’s main center Secali was absent due to injury.
However, the forward combination of Drexler + Xavier McDaniel + Anthony Mason gave the Heat enough strength in the frontcourt to contend with the Bulls.
This was the Bulls’ most challenging away game in December, as under Pat Riley’s management, the Miami Heat rose surprisingly quickly.
This season, Riley made two significant moves: first, in the summer, he managed to snatch Anthony Mason from the Trail Blazers to strengthen their interior lineup.
The other was to acquire Xavier McDaniel in a trade with the Seattle SuperSonics for Glen Rice, as X-man could no longer stay with the SuperSonics.
In training, McDaniel got into a conflict with his teammate Dale Ellis.
McDaniel believed Dale Ellis was not putting in enough effort in training, which escalated from a verbal altercation to a physical fight.
Ellis was beaten to a bloody mess; he was no match for McDaniel in a fight, and it is said that Ellis’s only counterattack was using his mobile phone to hit McDaniel.
In 1990, mobile phones were slowly becoming more common, but at that time, they were as big as bricks, able to make calls and also used for self-defense in a fight.
Conflicts between players, especially among core players, mean that a team can no longer continue to operate with the existing lineup.
Actually, the SuperSonics would have preferred to trade Dale Ellis, but his performance had declined over the last two seasons, and off-court troubles were frequent.
In the 1987 playoffs series where they defeated the Mavericks, he was involved in a bar fight and ended up getting arrested along with a teammate.
In 1988, he was sued twice for vehicular accidents.
In 1989, he was embroiled in a domestic violence scandal and charged again.
In January 1990, he was involved in a car accident while driving under the influence, resulting in a rib fracture and collapsed lung.
When Dale Ellis first arrived at the SuperSonics from the Mavericks in the 1987 season, filled with indignation and frustration from his time in Dallas, he exploded with tremendous energy.
He leaped from averaging 7 points to becoming a super scorer with an average of 25 points per game and got his revenge on his former team, the Dallas Mavericks, in the playoffs, which could be seen as a vindicating triumph.
In the 1988-1989 season, he was selected as an All-Star, reaching the peak of his career.
However, he got embroiled in various troubles in the last two seasons, and encountering a car accident that led to fractures and a collapsed lung was particularly devastating for a professional athlete.
